The Semantic Brand Score: Evidence from Fashion Retail Industry

Co-creation of the brand is an extensively studied concept that still lacks the diversity of methodological approaches. This research paper examines the Semantic Brand Score in the fashion retail industry to illustrate the core role of the fashion magazines in the creation of the fashion brands value and the role of text data in measuring brand importance communicated by these fashion magazines. The Semantic Brand Score is used alongside the Semantic Network Analysis to process 2018-2020 articles collected from the two categories of publishers: established magazines and independent magazines. A total of 35,091 observations have been collected for this purpose. Seven dimensions are examined within the final dataset - title, author, text, date, source, type. 15 fashion brands in 3 categories have been analyzed: luxury, high-street, sportswear. It has been revealed that for both types of magazines, luxury brands get the highest cumulative relative SBS score. Additionally, a thorough analysis has shown that luxury brands gain more attention from fashion magazines than other brands. However, it cannot be concluded that brand importance is closely related to the sentiment of the content produced by co-creators.